Charles A. Beard ([1913] 2004) argued that the U.S. Constitution was created to advance the personalty interests of many of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention. Because delegate votes on individual clauses at the Constitutional Convention were not publicly recorded, prior empirical...

We examine a balanced panel of globalization indices for 129 countries over the years 1991- 2010. We report evidence of cross-country sigma convergence in the overall globalization index. Sigma convergence also holds for each of the economic, political, and social globalization indices, as well...

According to World Bank policy, countries remain eligible to borrow from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development until they are able to sustain long-term development without further recourse to Bank financing. Graduation from the Bank is not an automatic consequence of reaching...

Diversity is often thought to create conflict and harm economic institutions. We hypothesize, however, that the impact of diversity is conditional on political institutions, and may be negative in some settings but positive in others, due to differences in the nature of rent seeking in different...